


It started with the end credits

by Scoby



Series: Decades of Reylo [4]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Blue French Fries, Cosplay, Dating, F/M, First Meetings, Head Injury, How many times do you have to watch ROTJ to kiss during it?, Meet-Cute, Meta, Star Wars Fans, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, bridal carry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:20:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25457665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scoby/pseuds/Scoby
Summary: It’s not like that at all. He’s my brother.Rey decides that she does not need to watch Leia kiss an astonished Han Solo for the fifth time. Instead, she turns to her side to kiss her own Solo.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Decades of Reylo [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1877596
Kudos: 20





	It started with the end credits

Rey sweeps a tear from the corner of her eye when Luke Skywalker burns his father’s armour and what is left of his body.

When the end credits start rolling, she curls her legs up on her seat to let the flow of Star Wars costumes pass in front of her and head towards the exit. She closes her eyes, tunes into the music and ignores the noises and movements that the rest of the premier audience makes on its way out.

When the credits are over, she stretches her arms and legs straight and stands up in the quiet movie theatre. But looking up along the rows of seats, she sees that she is not the only one who stayed for the credits. Under the dim lighting, somebody is standing in the middle of one of the higher rows, in a Darth Vader costume.

As Rey is looking up, the black figure starts climbing over the rows of chairs, making its way straight towards her. She panics and starts running, first to the end of her row, then down the stairs towards the exit. What she does not see is an island of popcorn that somebody has spilled on one step. When her hurried step falls on it, her foot slips and she rolls down the rest of the stairs. Everything goes blank.  
  


* * *

  
Ben wonders what just happened. He was taking the closest route towards the exit, when the only other person left in the theatre suddenly decided to run out. Now she is lying motionless on the ground below the stairs. He hurries down to her, diagonally through the hall over the seats.

She is breathing normally, just not moving or reacting to speaking or shaking. The left one of the buns on top of her ears has opened into a wavy pigtail. Ben supposes she hit her head and had a concussion. She will be fine but should not be left alone until she fully recovers. He has to search for any evidence about if she lives with somebody. If she would at least have an address book, he could go to the closest phonebooth to call her friends or family.

So he opens the neon pink and green bum bag that stands out on top of the white leggings and a large white sweater that swallows her upper body. But there is no address book. From the papers in her wallet, he finds out that her name is Rey, but the surname makes him doubt if her driving licence is even legal.

“Hurry up, we’re closing”, the janitor tells him.

Ben packs Rey’s things back into the tiny bag. With no better idea for what to do, he slides his arms under her shoulders and knees, picks her up and carries her into his own car.  
  


* * *

  
Rey is still unconscious when Ben reaches home, so he puts her down on the couch to recover. Soon, when he is pouring her a glass of water, she wakes up.

“Where am I?”

She sits up quickly and her hand shoots up to hold her head as her face twists in pain.

“You’re my guest.”

He hands her the glass of water but she leans away.

“Are you still afraid?”

“That happens when you’re being hunted by a creature in a mask.”

Only then he realises how the whole situation probably looked to her. He rips off the black duct tape that holds his mask together from the sides and takes it off.

“Sorry, there was nothing else I could do. You had a concussion so I couldn’t leave you alone. Do you live with somebody? I can take you home any time, if you’ll just have somebody with you there.”

Rey looks down and shakes her head. Ben makes another try of offering her the water and this time she takes it and drinks. He has a faint memory that it would be important to talk and stay alert after a concussion.

“Tell me about the movie. How did you like it?”

That loosens her up. She recounts to him all her favourite parts, everything she disagreed with and everything she needs to see again to understand better. He keeps responding with his own opinions and asking her for elaborations. After discussing the ending, they fall silent for a while.

“Do you think the Emperor was really destroyed?” she asks.

“I don’t know. I think it was very touching how Vader saved his son this way, but I would have expected that fully destroying the Emperor would take more than just throwing him into an abyss.”

“Yeah, me too. Like all the Jedi blowing him up with his own lightning or something.” She smiles when imagining it. “I’m pretty sure he'll still return in a sequel.”

They fall silent again and he reckons he can finally ask what he has been curious about:

“Is your name really Rey Skywalker?”

She just stares at him with her mouth open.

“Sorry, I needed to search for a number where I could have called about you”, he explains and glances down at her bag that she is still wearing over her waist. “You should keep an address book with a clearly marked emergency contact if you don’t want people to open your wallet if something like this happens to you.”

Rey's hand makes a small movement towards the bag, as if she is about to check if all her things still are there after he has obviously searched through everything. But something makes her decide to trust him, lean back on the couch and answer his question instead:

“I ran away from my foster dad. I needed fake papers so that I could disappear. Of course I chose my favourite surname."

”I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s ok, it’s been five years already. And it worked: he hasn’t found me since. What’s your name?”

“Ben Solo.”

“Are you sure you didn’t fake that, too? I didn’t know any Solos would exist outside of Star Wars.”

“You’re not the first person to say that but no, it just happens to be my name.”

Very soon, Rey’s eyelids start dropping and Ben figures that he has probably managed to keep her alert for long enough. She starts to already position herself lying down on the couch again but he interrupts her:

“You can sleep in my bed. I’ll stay here on the couch.”

“How can you possibly fit on this?”

Her gaze measures the narrow two-seat couch and his body. Even Rey herself has to fold a little to fit on this. She imagines that he might be in danger of hitting his own head with his knee. And he probably could not even lay here on his back without his other shoulder falling off the edge and going painfully numb. But if Ben is himself worried about it at all, he does not show it.

“I’ll figure it out. You need a better sleep to recover. Are you going? Or do I need to carry you again?”

Rey blushes when it hits her how exactly she ended up here unconscious. Her gaze wanders to his arms and chest that is covered with layers of black fabric and Darth Vader’s button arrangement. Part of her is tempted to resist until he would lift her up against that body again, this time so that she would be conscious enough to feel it.

But she stands up herself and takes a step towards the direction Ben gestures. The movement brings back the pain and dizziness in her head, and her step becomes wobbly. Just when she is about to fall, he is quickly by her side and catches her. The rest of the way to the bedroom, he holds her up from her waist and lets her lean on him for support.

With slow steps, they finally get her to the bed. She undoes what is remaining of the buns in her hair, leaves her bag and sweater on the nightstand, and curls under the blanket in her leggings and tank top. She seems to fall asleep almost right away.

Ben quietly opens his drawer to find his sleeping T-shirt and sweatpants and goes back to the living room to change. He manages to fall asleep on the couch, but it does not take long before he wakes up again. The apartment is cool and he has no blanket. He should have taken a long-sleeved shirt.

As quietly as he can, he goes back to the bedroom. In the dim light gleaming in from the living room, he sees that the blanket has almost fallen off Rey, only covering a part of her legs, even though the air in the bedroom is as cool as in the living room. Almost not daring to breathe, he holds up his forearm and, with the subtlest possible movement, brings the back of his hand down to touch her shoulder.

Her skin is soft, smooth, and cold. Carefully, Ben picks up the edge of the blanket and softly pulls it up to her neck and pushes is down as much as he dares. The way how her sleeping face responds with a faint snuffle makes him want to stroke the small freckled nose, the curve of the eyebrow and the line of the jaw. All he dares is to cautiously caress the tips of her hair on the pillow.

Afraid that she will eventually wake up, he forces himself to take his hand back and turn to his drawer to find another black shirt with long sleeves. He does not notice how Rey smiles, half-opens her eyes and watches as he grabs the collar of his T-shirt, pulls it off over his head, folds it into the drawer and puts on the other shirt. When he takes a last look at Rey before going out, she quickly closes her eyes and pretends to sleep again.  
  


* * *

  
In the morning, Ben wakes up to the smell of coffee and toast. Rey has silently figured out his kitchen. He stands up and is relieved to notice that his back aches only about half of the amount he was expecting. He pours himself a cup of coffee, presses two more toasts down in the toaster and joins her at the small table.

“How do you feel now?”

“Much better!”

Ben agrees that she looks like recovered. At some point of the breakfast, they realise that yesterday they only talked about Return of the Jedi and nothing about their love for the two earlier episodes. They go through several sets of toasts and cups of coffee while diving into all their favourite and problematic elements of the saga, now that they have the perspective available for analysing the whole trilogy. The sun is already high when Rey finally asks:

“Can you show me where I am? I would see how I can get home.”

Ben opens the map of a phonebook and puts his smallest finger on their location.

“I can drive you home.”

But examining the map, Rey’s eyes turn bright.

“Actually, I live close.” She brings her finger on the map, too, to a point just an inch away from his, which is almost a mile’s distance in reality. “And I’d like to walk, to flush out what’s left of the headache.”

“Can I call you later today? Somebody should check if you made it home and how you’re doing.”

He hands her a note cube and pen and she picks up a piece of paper and scribbles her number on it. He does the same and puts the note with his own number down on the table in front of her.

“And please call me if anything happens. Even if just a bit of the headache or dizziness returns.”

Rey nods carelessly, folds the note in her bag, puts on her sweater again and clips the bag over it. She thanks Ben for help and hospitality and walks out of the door. He stays in the window to watch as long as he can see her, thankful that her walking looks more normal now than yesterday.

He tries to keep busy to take his mind off her, but every few minutes he keeps eyeing at the clock, wondering about when a reasonable time has passed for him to call her without appearing way overly protective. At around three o’clock in the afternoon, he gives up and dials her number.

The seconds before she picks up feel infinitely long. He starts to already be sure that she has fainted on her floor or already on the street on her way, and he should have never let her go alone. Just when his mind has progressed to an image of her lying dead by the street corner, white clothes smudged, brow bleeding, unseeing eyes staring at the sky, she picks up.

“Rey Skywalker.”

“Hey, this is Ben. I just wanted to to check if you’re ok.”

“Yes, I am, all fine. Thanks for asking.”

“Ok, good to hear that. And, emmm, now that we're talking, another thing I was wondering… Would you like to see it again?”

“See what?”

“Return of the Jedi.”

“Again?”

“Well, yeah, we seemed to both like it, and I was thinking that, just maybe, this time we could have dinner before it. And if you’d fall on the stairs again, I could catch you sooner.”

She giggles in the other end. Waiting for her response feels like another eternity. In reality, only few seconds pass before she bursts out:

“I’d like that!”  
  


* * *

  
When Rey appears out of the front door of her apartment block, Ben sees that she has also skipped the Star Wars -inspired clothing this time. Her leggings are now bright pink and topped with yellow leg warmers. Her shirt is neon green and on top of everything she is wearing the same bum bag and a giant light blue jeans jacket. Her hair is tied behind her head, in an array of three ponytails, all of them teased so that they form an oval brown cloud. She looks so cute he feels like hugging her, and before he can think about it more, he does. She smells like something with hints of flowers and citrus.

On the way, they continue chatting right from where they left off back in his apartment. He drives them to the same movie theatre, but they go first to the McDonald’s next to it to eat their Return of the Jedi meal with its blue-coloured french fries. The movie itself seems even better this time. Once in a while, they whisper excitedly to each other when they realize new things they missed the first time.

They listen through the whole end credits music and are again the only ones in the theater when it finishes. When they stand up and walk to the edge of the row of chairs, Ben grabs Rey’s hand before she can step on the stairs. She looks up at him and chuckles, but does not let go. And neither does he, not until they are back to the car. He drops Rey off at her place and drives home with a blissful grin.

Next time, it is Rey who calls him.

“Ben Solo.”

“Hello, it’s me. I was just missing you a bit… and wondering if you’d like to see it again.”

“Return of the Jedi? You know, we could see another movie…”

“How many times did you see the Empire?”

“Five.”

“Me, too. We’re not even close to that yet.”

“You’re right. We should go.”

And they see it again. And again in a couple of weeks. And then once more. And soon after that it hits them both: the final week when Return of the Jedi is going to play in theaters. Ben does not bother calling. He just shows up on Rey’s doorstep.

“Are you busy?”

“No, come in!”

He steps in the Rey-sized apartment filled with her subtle flowery and citrusy scent.

“It’s not going to play anymore after this week. Are you ready to go in ten minutes?”

“I think so. Just a sec.”

He sits down on an orange couch that is even smaller than his own, as Rey gathers her things and disappears for a moment to change clothes and do her hair into a single high ponytail on the side of her head. She opts for pink and green leggings with the same white sweater as she wore for the premier. Ben smiles at the memory it brings up and pulls her into a hug before they hurry out of the door.  
  


* * *

_  
You love him, don’t you?_

_Yes._

_Alright, I understand. Fine. When he comes back, I won’t get in the way._

_It’s not like that at all. He’s my brother._

Rey decides that she does not need to watch Leia kiss an astonished Han Solo for the fifth time. Instead, she turns to her side to kiss her own Solo. He hesitates for a moment in awe, but catches up quickly. When they pull back, their eyes turn back to the screen only briefly before he kisses her again.

They do not bother watching the celebration or the end credits. Their eyes stay closed and tongues in each other’s mouths, apart from the small breaks they take to gaze into each other’s hungry and loving eyes. The music has already ended when they are interrupted by the janitor’s voice:

“Hurry up, we’re closing.”


End file.
